Four Quarters of Light Read Free Page A

smothered me. In the Belfast back streets where the only green space was locked away from me behind iron railings I drank deeply from London’s elixir and its taste stayed in my mouth. Foolishly or not, when I was younger I was a man who was afraid of being afraid. It forced me to make choices and flooded me with questions I felt only the Northland itself could answer. But I was older now and hopefully a little wiser. Maybe I was tired of being afraid of being afraid. If I was to ‘forget many things . . . abandon the old ideals and the old gods . . . and reverse the very codes’ that had formed me then perhaps I could only fully reclaim this lost part of myself during a wilderness experience.
    Was Alaska still peopled with those quirky, eccentric and reclusive individuals that made Robert Service famous and fascinated London? Service’s rhythmic and zestful poems about the rugged life of the Yukon were also part of my growing up. ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ and ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’ were in every school anthology and brought the Canadian outback into our mundane school days. Alaska was called the ‘Final Frontier’ before the writers of
Star Trek
hijacked the phrase, and I wondered if it still had the same kind of allure for people as it had for its most famous writers. What impels people towards finality and the last place on earth, and what do they resolve there? Whydo they stay in the seemingly inhospitable land? Have they a perverse sense of beauty akin to my own? If so, how do they understand it? These were my questions, and neither London nor Service could answer for me.
    Maybe the Final Frontier is an inaccurate description, for assuredly Alaska is the Frontier of Fable. The onion-domed churches of nineteenth-century Russian Orthodoxy still break up the skyline around Juneau, Sitka and Kodiak. Further north the Inuit peoples cling to their religious beliefs with their shamanism and an animistic respect for the natural world from which we all could learn much. And everywhere one still finds those curious, rugged, idealistic individuals who have washed up in this vastness, and perhaps it’s the proper place for them, for here the emptiness is big enough to contain their madness. Only a place as immense as Alaska can properly contain a fevered imagination. This is the land that Swift, C. S. Lewis and Tolkien never discovered, as fantastical as a fairy-tale but undersewn with deep soul-searching.
    I began to pore over maps of Alaska. But any map of Alaska is a Spartan illustration: railway lines and road systems are conspicuous by their absence and Juneau, the state capital, is accessible only by air and sea. The state is more easily measured in time zones than miles. It contains four such zones and a total population of just over 600,000, half of whom reside in Anchorage, Alaska’s largest town and port; the rest of the population is spread out across this massive, seemingly endless state in communities that make the map look more like a join-the-dots picture such as you find in children’s colouring books. But this is no childhood fantasy land. The incomprehensible hugeness of the place is something to be wary of. I remember a friend I had met during my first brief visit to Alaska saying, ‘Be careful when you’re reading maps in Alaska. Names don’t always mean places and named places don’t always guarantee that people live there. There are some communities in Alaska where people live so far from one another that they are all but invisible. That kind of landscape doesn’t only make you feel small, it can be very scary and very dangerous too.’
    I thought over my friend’s words as I scanned the place names spread out before me. The Inuit names scattered around the margins of the landmass were curious and almost unpronounceable; my tongue tripped over glottal stops as I tried to say them: Unalakleet, Koyukok, Umiat, Shungnak and